Having finished my previous book, There Are Rivers in the Sky, much of which ties to Assyrian/Mesopotamian culture and the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets, I resurrected and reread my old teaching copy of Gilgamesh. Basically an adventure story of King Gilgamesh of Uruk–along with his friend Enkidu and the forest monster Humbaba, whom they have to defeat, as well as the gods and goddesses that both help and interfere–I was reminded of how much these hero journeys have in common.
Considered the world’s oldest, surviving literary work, Gilgamesh clearly influenced the The Bible as well as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Obviously these stories, which have numerous commonalities among all of the ancient works, were oral tales passed on before they were written down. But as the oldest, Gilgamesh preceded them by a thousand years–the later works borrowed from it just as Shakespeare borrowed from stories written long before his plays.
Like so much ancient literature, its themes deal with power, friendship, hubris, love, grief, immortality, heroism, and probably narcissism. And much of the action relates to pleasing or offending various Gods, which somehow remains relevant even today.
This was a reminder that it’s always good to go back and pick up a classic.
Discover more from Bean's Book Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I have to admit that I have very little memory of this book now. I used to own that same Penguin Classic you show in the preview image, but I’ve no idea where it is now. But I’d like to read it again. It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how stories feed into other stories, both oral and written, through the centuries? It’s hard to imagine the feats of memory involved in passing on such long stories orally, and I wonder how much they changed with each telling, which details were dropped or added, and what they’d be like today if they hadn’t been written down and fixed in a single version but had instead continued evolving as they passed from mouth to mouth.
LikeLike